Episode 87: How To Stop Holding Ourselves Back And Explore An Opportunity To Change Careers

Career transitions are tough for all of us. Leveling-up or transitioning into a new role or field is challenging because we have to prove that we can do the job, especially when our resume doesn’t reflect relevant or exact experience recruiters or hiring managers are looking for.

 

The countless rejections may cause us to want to stay in our current role and hope that someone will acknowledge our skills, talents, and efforts.

 

However, we cannot build a career on hope alone!

 

In today’s episode of Build, we’re going to share what holds people back from advocating for themselves successfully, and in the next episode, we’ll dig into ways you can make the transition happen.

 

To help us out, I’ve invited Amy Sun who is a partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm. In case you’re curious, Amy’s firm Sequoia Capital has been investing in companies since 1972. They have invested in 250+ companies, and some notable ones are Apple, Google, Oracle, PayPal, Stripe, YouTube, Instagram, Yahoo! and WhatsApp.

 

Last year at Grace Hopper, Sequoia Capital was the sponsor for a workshop I was co-teaching with Karen Catlin, which gave me the opportunity to meet Amy. After the workshop, Amy and I had the chance to chat, and I learned about her exciting background and thought it would be wonderful to share it with you.

 

What surprised me was that Amy didn’t start her career with the intention of becoming a venture capitalist; her first real job was as a snowboarding instructor!

 

After graduating from college, she began her career in tech as a product marketer, then eventually became a growth marketer and product manager.

 

As you tune into today’s episode, here’s what you’ll learn from Amy:

 

• How to deal with the inner critic inside each of us who worries about: “What people are going to think” and get your foot in the door in spite of it
• How to suss out if you are missing experience
• How to handle roles that are and aren’t clearly defined or vary between companies
• The value of shadowing people and doing your homework
• How happenstance and luck play into transitions

 

“If you think about your career as the sum of all the knowledge you have—it’s not like you’re throwing away all the experience you’ve had in the past to start from scratch. Having a diverse set makes you more uniquely qualified for certain roles. So rather than holding yourself back by thinking: ‘Oh I don’t want to start from the ground (zero), and all my experience before is useless,’ think about it as compounding upon each other.” — Amy Sun, Partner at Sequoia Capital

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Build is produced by Femgineer (http://femgineer.com/).